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The Medium & the Magician

Mina Crandon’s followers believed she had genuine paranormal powers. HarryHoudini was equally certain she was a fraud.

By Daniel Stashower

It was a tense and rather peculiar gathering that took place on July 23, 1924, at 10 Lime Street, an elegant four-story brick house in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston. In a narrow room on the top floor, five distinguished men had come together to try to communicate with the dead. Their hostess–and guide to the spirit realm–was vivacious, 36-year-old Mina Crandon, who had in recent months become well-known to the public under a stage name of sorts: “Margery the Medium.”

Margery greeted her visitors in a flimsy dressing gown, bedroom slippers, and silk stockings. This attire, which left little to the imagination, was intended to rule out the possibility of concealment or trickery. It may have had other effects on her male visitors. Margery’s girlish figure, fashionably bobbed light-brown hair, and sparkling blue eyes combined to make her, in the words of one bedazzled admirer, “too attractive for her own good.”

During the previous year, Margery had conducted dozens of similar gatherings, or séances, for some hundreds of impressionable friends and acquaintances. Seated around a wooden table in the pitch-black room, Margery and her fellow “sitters” experienced a wide range of unearthly happenings. Mysterious bumps and raps rang out. Strange flashes of light pierced the darkness. Sometimes a wind-up Victrola would stop and start of its own accord, or disembodied voices would call from the shadows. Once a live pigeon appeared in the room, seemingly conjured from thin air. Even the table itself became an active participant in the proceedings, rearing up on two legs or rising toward the ceiling. At one especially lively sitting, it pursued a visitor from the room and knocked him off his feet.

Each of these remarkable events was thought to offer proof of the validity of spiritualism, the belief that it is possible for the dead to communicate with the living through an earthly conduit known as a medium. “I consider the psychic question to be infinitely the most important thing in the world,” declared Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes and the world’s most visible proponent of spiritualism. “All modern inventions and discoveries will sink into insignificance beside those psychic facts which will force themselves within a few years upon the universal human mind.”

Conan Doyle was not alone in this view. Spiritualism had been on the wane for decades, but in the wake of World War I, as death touched tens of thousands of households on both sides of the Atlantic, the movement underwent a rebirth. Friends and relatives of fallen soldiers flocked to séances, desperate to receive some word or sign of “life beyond the veil.” Many of the mediums who set up shop during this period were obvious frauds, callously playing upon the hopes of the bereaved. Others, like Mina Crandon, were not so easily dismissed. Her astonishing versatility and personal charm soon propelled her to international fame, and sparked an enduring controversy.

To a large extent, that controversy began at Margery’s July 23 séance. Up to this point, the medium had displayed her talents almost exclusively to sympathetic audiences, who readily saw evidence of their departed loved ones in the strange manifestations at Lime Street. On that particular night, however, the sitters were of a more critical frame of mind, none more so than the man seated to Margery’s left–Harry Houdini.

Houdini, who had achieved world fame through his skills as a magician and his abilities as an escape artist, had been creating a new role for himself as the “scourge of spirit mediums.” “I am willing to be convinced,” he wrote earlier that year; “my mind is open, but the proof must be such as to leave no vestige of doubt that what is claimed to be done is accomplished only through or by supernatural power.”

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